Five questions to ask before booking your volunteer trip

Over at Volunteer Global, Sarah lists five questions to ask before booking your volunteer trip.

I thought I would respond to them from Meaningful Volunteer's perspective.

The satisfying thing about answering these questions, is that is information is all readily available on our site and all I need to do is link to it!

Let's look at our fair trade fashion label project Mama Pamba as an example:

1. How much does the placement cost, and what does this cover?
   Mama Pamba costs $700 per month and this is where we spend the money.
   
   
2. Where exactly is this placement?
   Buyaya in Eastern Uganda.  We also have a detailed census that we conducted about Buyaya and photos of the accommodation.
   
   
3. What kind of work will I do?
   Mama Pamba is a relatively complex project.  We have created job descriptions for several roles within the project. For example, here is the job description for the human resource manager position.
   
   
4. What kind of schedule do volunteers have?
   This is covered in the aforementioned job descriptions.
   
   
5. Do you have alumni I can connect with?
   We have abundant volunteers who are happy to share their experiences.  Anyone of our staff members can provide this information.

We also just released our volunteer manual for Uganda. You can download it here.  We believe informed volunteers are empowered volunteers!